


Cedarwood

by DianaSolaris



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Child Abandonment, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Feels, Family Issues, Gen, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Korean Keith (Voltron), background sheith if you squint but tbh this is basically their canon relationship, let keith be fucking happy, so ymmv on what it actually counts as
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-28 21:50:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13912878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DianaSolaris/pseuds/DianaSolaris
Summary: The trouble is, Seojun never asked for a son - but he's got one anyway, and the rest is just... how it works out. Happy ending! Lots of feels.





	Cedarwood

The trouble is, Seojun never asked for a son. It’s not that he never thought about starting a family (-there were times when he would lie awake and gaze at Krolia and wonder with a hesitant excitement what her children would look like-) but families are families. Babies with wide eyes and features that can’t quite decide what they are and sheathed knives tied into their swaddling - babies that are poor replacements for a wife you’ve only just embarked upon a lifetime of loving - they aren’t families.

 

Still, it’s all he has, and if a Kwon knows how to do anything, it’s how to make do. So he props up the tiny little thing (Keith, says the note she left behind, and part of him wants to spite her and call him something else, but he can’t think of anything else) and begins hacking together a crib. And he doesn’t know what babies want, or what they should play with, or what they want to hear. He expected to have time. He expected to be going to parenting classes and researching things and hanging out with other fathers and fathers-to-be, before he even had to think about a living, breathing thing. 

 

Instead, his wife vanished in the middle of the night, and a year later, he has a child. 

 

“You know what kind of wood this is?” he starts off. It’s ridiculous, he knows. “This is red cedar.” He picks up the rod and rolls it between his fingers - he’s got ten, which will have to be enough - and grins at the baby, who just stares back at him with those unnatural purple eyes. Krolia’s eyes. “It smells nice. It’s not the best, but it’s good for the desert.”

 

Keith cocks his head and babbles something. “Da.”

 

It’s not exactly a word, but Seojun feels his face split into a grin anyway. “Da. You know that’s Russian for yes?” 

 

“Beh!”

 

“You’ll get there, kiddo.”

 

The crib starts to come together. He has to stop in the middle as Keith starts to cry, and he’s glad that Krolia dropped off formula for him as well otherwise Seojun would be up shit paddle without a creek - or whatever the child safe version of that is. 

 

“God, do you ever stop crying? I know you’re hungry, kid, I’m workin’ on it.”

 

But Keith doesn’t stop, and Seojun catches a pudgy fist on his cheekbone before finally managing to tuck the baby into the crook of his arm and get the baby bottle into his mouth.  _ That  _ gets him to quiet down. 

 

Seojun wants to be angry. He feels like he should be angry.

 

He never asked for a son.

 

“...You’re awfully little,” he sighs. What kind of world is it where he’s resentful at a baby for showing up? Besides, it doesn’t take a therapist to know who he’s really angry with - if he could just  _ feel  _ something. His stomach feels like an empty pit.

 

Keith finishes feeding, and then he looks up at Seojun with those wide eyes again. Like he’s asking permission. 

 

“Da.”

 

Seojun reaches up to tickle Keith’s nose, and Keith grabs onto his fingers with a burbling laugh. 

 

“Dada.”

 

“That’s right,” Seojun whispers, and then suddenly his vision is blurring. “That’s right, Keith. Dada. And - and your momma will come back. She’s just off doing important things. So it’s just you and me, ok, bub?”

 

“Ghgh?”

 

“Just you and me.”

 

He’ll finish the crib soon. Right now, he’s holding on to Keith, telling himself between each question, each worry that comes to mind - each new thing he can’t remember or never knew how to do -  _ it’ll work out, it’ll work out, it’ll work out. _

 

_ We’ll make do. _

 

\---

 

It takes Keith a few tries to get through the wooden bars on the door, and once he does, the door itself careens down onto the floor, sending up a burst of dust and sand. A few scorpions scuttle away, but otherwise, the house is empty and silent.

 

Keith supposes it’s for the best that nobody else ever moved in. Truth be told, he was surprised to find the shack still out here.

 

“Are you sure you want me here?” Shiro asks quietly.

 

“Yeah,” Keith replies. Words beyond that would just be irrelevant. He’s too busy looking around at the house that is almost exactly as he remembers it.

 

The crib is still in the corner. Keith can smell the faint hint of cedar lingering in the air. 

 

“What happened?” Shiro asks quietly, taking a hesitant step inside. He’s trying to let Keith have his space, and Keith appreciates it - but he’s had his space. Years of it.

 

He exhales, and sticks his hands into his pockets, trying not to look at the crib for too long. HIs dad never quite got it right. He remembers - very distantly, very vaguely - the image of his father wrestling with one part or another of it. “He managed the best he could. But, uh, he wasn’t ready for a kid. And my mom just kind of dropped me on him.”

 

Shiro nods. He adjusts one of the empty picture frames on the wall. Keith has a vague memory of that, too - not buying it, but of his father apologizing to somebody, explaining that he’d find something to put in it when ‘things were a little less chaotic’.

 

“I was… six? Almost six. And the social worker came by a few times. Kept asking Dad questions. And eventually Dad just -” 

 

All of a sudden, like it’s been waiting for him to be standing here, in the middle of the house he didn’t get to grow up in, like it’s been lying dormant all these years, the lump rises in his throat and he can’t breathe.

 

Shiro’s arms wrap around him, and he tries to swallow it down before he can tell Shiro the rest. But Shiro’s already looking around, at the crib made of unsanded cedar wood, at the bare lightbulb, at the scatter of bills that never got cleared away from the low table.

 

“He gave you up,” he murmurs. 

 

“Yeah,” Keith breathes. The tears trickle down his face and land on the dry floor, resting on top of the sand as perfect droplets for a few moments before they soak into the ground. 

 

He doesn’t tell Shiro the next part until a few days later, when they’re lying out underneath the stars. How his father’s still alive, and how the moment Keith got access to a Garrison computer - 

 

\- he looked him up. 

 

Seojun Kwon is still living in the next city over, Keith knows. And he’s got two little kids that probably don’t have any alien DNA, and he’s working for the municipality as a city engineer.

 

Keith could contact him, if he wanted to. But it’s funny the things that you remember, even when the adults around think you’re too young to understand, to hear -

 

But Seojun never asked for a son.

 

\----

 

Seojun doesn’t pay attention to the news these days. Work keeps him busy enough as it is. But well, when Earth is under threat, who  _ doesn’t  _ pay attention? And when the Galra come up - 

 

“Oh, hell,” he murmurs. 

 

Things come to a head, and then victory’s won by something he can’t possibly understand. It takes time for the people flying… whatever it is… to show their faces. Teenagers. All of them.

 

And then, suddenly, a face he never thought he’d seen again.

 

Seojun drops the dish he’s drying on the floor, barely hearing the splintering sound it makes. “Keith?” he whispers.

 

And he tries. God, he tries. He calls the Garrison, but they leave him on hold for hours on end, only to tell him he isn’t a registered family member of any of the Voltron pilots - “Like hell I’m not,” he growls, even though he knows it’s true, he gave up that right thirteen years ago - and he sits down with his wife and explains what he can. 

 

But the face is all he has to go on.

 

A week later, the doorbell rings. His wife goes to answer it, and Seojun doesn’t even think about it, it doesn’t register -

 

“Oh!” 

 

Then, Seojun turns around from the thermostat he’s fixing, and there’s a boy standing there in the hallway, unsure where to put his hands, unsure where to look so he fixes his eyes squarely on a small portion of the floor. There’s somebody else behind him, offering a soft smile both to Celia and to Seojun, and then his hand’s on the boy’s shoulder.

 

They wait for somebody to speak. Then Keith opens his mouth, lips so chewed that Seojun can see the scars -

 

“Your floor. It’s, um. It’s cedar.”

 

The man behind him looks puzzled, and Celia looks almost affronted. But Seojun rushes forward and pulls Keith into a hug, squeezing him until there’s a quiet yelp from the skinny boy in his arms. 

 

“Oh my god you’re strong,” Keith wheezes. 

 

“You got  _ tall! _ ”

 

“Well, I mean, that  _ happens, _ ” Keith replies, but there’s a small sparkle in his eyes as Seojun puts him down, and Seojun’s chest fills with a nervous, happy warmth. 

 

“You’re staying for dinner. Right?”

 

The sparkle dies down a little. “I - I mean -”

 

“If you want us,” the man behind him finishes, voice encouraging. There’s a bit of a warning in his glance at Seojun too -  _ don’t fuck this up.  _

 

Seojun looks down at Keith, so scared, so worried that there won’t be room for him. He’s just a man - he doesn’t have the words to explain that there’s always been an empty picture frame on his side of the bed, that there would always be room at the table for him, that giving him up was like tearing his own heart out of his chest - Words can only get him so far. 

 

Instead he wraps an arm around Keith’s shoulders. “Of course,” he replies, as smoothly and as naturally as he can. Then quietly, for Keith only, he murmurs, “I’m not going to waste my second chance.” 

 

Keith’s face lights up, and he ducks his head, but he can’t hide the way his eyes glow with a happiness he can’t hide. 

 

Second chances are rare and wonderful things - and this time, thinks Seojun with relief and excitement and a thousand other feelings he’s too scared to name - this time, he’s not alone. 


End file.
